Granderson: After Biden’s pardon, is Texas ready to rethink marijuana?
With Election Day looming, Texans are turning to marijuana legalization to ensure that their votes will mean something.
The Texas State Bar is offering free marijuana classes that could help citizens decide if the drug is for them. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers introduced a legalization bill to the Texas Legislature, but it’s not clear they’ll get a vote in the final days of the session.
Meanwhile, the legal weed is still out of reach for Texas’ estimated 1.2 million marijuana-using citizens.
Some experts who spoke with The Texas Tribune say Texas has a real opportunity to bring in a thriving marijuana business to this state.
But in Texas, marijuana is still criminalized and a pot farm under federal jurisdiction. As a result, most Texas marijuana businesses will need to deal with an ever-present threat of prosecution.
“We would not want to take away the revenue stream out of business,” said Robert M. Poynter, a professor emeritus of law at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law. “But we couldn’t ignore that it was criminal.”
Here in Fort Worth, cannabis was decriminalized in 1995, but only Texans 21 and over can legally buy it. Poynter said the law left the door open to Texas pot growers.
“If the local governments could get together and say: ‘We’ll be the first to plant and harvest, the only one, and we’ll take a cut when legalization happens,’ then we’d be in good shape,” Poynter said. “But we’re not seeing that right now.”
Poynter said the Texas Legislature could do two things to keep the pot industry thriving: open up the market to marijuana growers from Oklahoma and New Mexico or decriminalize adult use in order to encourage more people to smoke pot.
“Pot is not like alcohol or cigarettes, where one kind of makes you go crazy,” Poynter said. “So if you make it legal
